When I came to Tarnów as bishop in 1990, people still remembered Otto Schimek, a Wehrmacht
soldier in World War II who was shot for insubordination. According to the romantic
version of his death, having perceived the immoral nature of the war started by the Nazis,
he refused to shoot Poles and paid for this with his life.
During the martial law period, the
memory of Schimek inspired young people to protest against the violence practiced by the
authorities at the time. The supposed site of Schimek's grave was visited by pilgrims from
the farthest reaches of Poland who came to pay their respects to a young soldier who had
valued the voice of his conscience so highly that, at a time of a total disrespect for
moral principles, he was capable of drawing a clear dividing line between honor and
barbarity.
At that time, there were ideas of having Schimek canonized as an example of how a strong
personality can guide itself by its own conscience, even under the most difficult
circumstances when human rights are being trodden underfoot. However, such plans had to be
abandoned when I received files on the sentence by the court-martial that had sentenced
Schimek to death. According to these files, prepared for internal Wehrmacht use,
the reason for Schimek's death was rather more mundane than the legend would have us
believe. Apparently, Schimek was a rouge who broke all the rules of military discipline.
This was one of those cases, present in popular tales, of finding one just man in Sodom.
Once again, it was a beautiful legend, but far removed from the reality. However, in such
tales we find expression of our search for the kind of patterns of human dignity in which
not even an aggressive outburst of barbarity is capable of destroying elementary human
solidarity.
The inhabitants of Jedwabne were unable to emulate the patterns of behavior commonly
attributed to Schimek. There are no documents showing that, on that tragic day, the
inhabitants tried to express fundamental solidarity with their Jewish fellow men. One can
pursue never-ending discussions on the extent to which that barbaric situation was the
result of Nazi provocation and to what extent it reflected the individual sentiments of
the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne, but this will not alter the fact that waiting in
Jedwabne for the style of behavior attributed to the Schimek of popular legend was just
like waiting for Godot.
I am inclined to believe that, on that fateful day in Jedwabne, various feelings permeated
the crowd of people watching the anguished figures screaming in pain among the flames.
Some of them saw the dying victims as recent supporters of Bolshevik rule, whereas others
saw them as local businessmen who had enjoyed economic success until quite recently. There
must also have been people whose feeling of shame was combined with a sense of fatalism in
the face of relentless events over which the inhabitants of small towns have scant
influence. Any attempt to establish the mathematical proportions of these feelings is
doomed to failure. In any case, they would not contribute anything to a moral assessment
of the situation, since it would be madness to suggest that could have existed any
justification for the mass burning to death of human beings inside a barn.
Attempts at reconstructing mechanisms of crowd psychology that might mitigate the dramatic
import of that situation change little, because reference to crowd psychology can be used
in the attempt to excuse the most shameful behavior. The society or local community of
Jedwabne was no anonymous crowd of spectators bearing grievances sparked by prior
resentments and prejudices. Its cultural environment should also have been inspired by
Christian ethics. Father Maksymilian Kolbe, who lived by these ethics, was able to lay
down his life in Auschwitz for a fellow man who had been sentenced to death. It is true
that we cannot expect the inhabitants of provincial localities to display on a day-to-day
basis the kind of heroism manifested in the lives of the great saints. Yet there were
reasons, in that situation, to expect a basic human solidarity that proved lacking.
At a time when many values are becoming blurred, the border between heroism and barbarity
often proves difficult to establish immediately. The case of Jedwabne is a warning to all
those who, claiming to be masters of relativism, would like to erase these borders. Even
if establishing a dividing line between good and evil is sometimes more difficult than we
think, Jedwabne is an example of moral evil in which that indifference that is explained
by powerlessness leads to embarrassment and a feeling of shame.
The helpless acceptance of barbarity as a means of action evokes a feeling of powerless
inside us, as well as giving rise to the question: "Why is it so easy to accept and
become used to primitive displays of aggression towards our fellow human beings?"
This question has been asked by many people who examined the mechanisms behind the
trivialization of evil. One of those who asked it, in the pages of Słonecznik [The
Sunflower], was Simon Wiesenthal. In this book, he describes a community of petty timid
conformists in the 1930s, in which the average German stifled his conscience by means of
the pragmatic principle: "We have to live with Hitler somehow because millions of
others are doing so. The neighbors are watching us." Looking to one's neighbors, who
helped make up the mindless crowds, made it easy to silence one's conscience-at least for
a while. Only after many years did "good boys" from bourgeois families admit in
the hour of their death: "I wasn't born a murderer. They made a murderer out of
me..." This anonymous "they" is easily identifiable with the term man, as
used by Heidegger. It effaces the shape of the individual responsibility of
those who succeeded in extolling an ideology of hatred by exploiting the convenient
indifference of their immediate environment.
There are situations where psychologically easy indifference turns out to be a crime. In
order to learn any lessons from the painful spread of barbarity, one must know how to
place one's personal moral responsibility above the anonymous mentality of a crowd, in
which moral choice is supplanted by the automatic copying of our neighbors' conformism.
Barbarity can be accepted by average people who have no intention of excusing genocide or
destroying humanistic culture. Wiesenthal recalls several SS-men who loved the music of
Bach, Grieg and Wagner. Even SS-Untersturmführer Richard Rokita, well known for
his sadism and cruelty, used to wipe the tears from his eyes whenever he listened to the Funeral
Tango.
The insane plan to exterminate the Jews did not, therefore, appear out of nowhere as the
product of someone's sick mind; neither was it fuelled by a disdain for the European
cultural heritage. It assumed a much more subtle form, in which the supporters of insane
ideas were sometimes able to appear in the role of intellectuals, quoting the words of
persons of authority who were regarded as symbols of courage and engaged in a creative
search for new directions. They cited not only the racist anthropology of Gobineau, but
also the great works of Heidegger or Nietzsche's ideas about the Übermensch, whose
rhetoric still fascinates many people today. The background to these peoples' ideas was
supplied by broad circles of conformists who drew comfort, under the influence of facile
optimism, from the fact that Hitler would do all the dirty work and then "shuffle off
the stage" because the German nation was too great to entrust its long-term future to
psychopaths. This background was also eked out by influential intellectual circles that
created a climate in which absurdity, barbarity and sadism lost their previous
significance and became capable of providing the foundations for a new world built by Übermenschen
deprived of elementary logic and traditional morals.
Eventually, the spreading barbarity reached the inhabitants of small towns, who calmly
silenced the voices of their conscience by referring to the authority of those who were
acting as the ultimate experts on the subject of the Jewish question. Genocide -
trivialized at a certain stage of social control-started a chain reaction that spread
beyond the confines of political systems and cultural traditions. The ad hoc pollution
of the intellectual environment by ignoring the truth and shunning moral responsibility
permitted the uninhibited growth of all kinds of distortions, including the excusing of
barbarity by small-town communities that had previously only read about barbarity in the
papers.
The drama of Jedwabne bears a bitter lesson of truth about mankind. It is particularly
bitter for those who consider the barbarity of Nazism as nothing other than a local
variety of genocide, horrifyingly alien to the commendable remainder of humanity. It
transpires that the truth about human nature is much more complex. The victims of
barbarous aggression can easily grow accustomed to it, and end up applying new aggression
against the innocent. The spiral of evil knows no ethnic restrictions, and we cannot
consider any environment to be immune to the radiation of primitivism. This bitter truth
affords protection against ideological delusions whereby some people attempt to extol
blood ties or cultural affinities. These values cannot be worshipped as contemporary
deities because human susceptibility to evil transcends all the borders of the categories
we hold dear.
Does a realization of this bitter truth have to lead to pessimism or even to relativism,
in which our faith in man disintegrates? I think not. We can learn the painful truth of
the entire complexity of human nature from the biblical story of King David. David, the
author of the consummately poetical Psalms, was unable to follow the voice of his
conscience when Bathsheba appeared in his life (2 Book of Samuel, chapter 11). His world
went haywire; in the face of a cataclysmic situation, the entire system of previously
recognized values lay in ruins. The radiation of evil, assuming the form of a chain
reaction, induced him to intrigues that cost Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, his life (2
Samuel 11, 15-17). How many Uriahs does David have to destroy before we view David's
tragedy the same way we view the tragedy of Jedwabne?
An important quality of David is that he was capable of admitting his own fault. "And
David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, the
Lord also hath put away thy sin" (2 Samuel 12, 13 ff.). What is significant is that
David does not attempt to seek excuses for his deed. He does not argue that he found
himself in a qualitatively new situation in which he lost his wits and his elementary
sense of moral responsibility. His remark "I have sinned against the Lord"
remains a clear, manly sign of moral responsibility. It liberates us from delusions
according to which there are people, and perhaps entire nations, that are a pure
embodiment of moral good.
In our world, good is mixed with evil-just as it was in the life of King David. However,
this does not excuse us from moral responsibility, nor does it make a virtue of
indifference to evil. Therefore let us not search for some imaginary historical documents
that could turn the tragedy of Jedwabne into a commonplace event. Such documents cannot
exist, because the death of innocent beings can never be reduced to the status of an
incident.
Today, we need to pray for the victims of that massacre, displaying the spiritual
solidarity that was missing at the hour when they left the land of their fathers. In the
name of those who looked upon their death with indifference, we need to repeat David's
words: "I have sinned against the Lord", regardless of whether any
protest from the onlookers might have been efficacious in that situation.